Smile Page 9

  The weather grew stifling, as if somebody had closed the doors on England. Towns, cities, old and new hills – they were all one room. I found it more and more difficult to sleep. At first I thought it was the thunder; each evening it rumbled, way beyond the hills I had never visited. But then I realized why I felt uneasy. Ranjit was looking at me.

  I would see him out of the corner of my eye; I would catch sight of him reflected in the glass-fronted cabinet. His eyes were on me. I behaved as normal but I started to sweat. I thought: he knows something’s wrong.

  The next Thursday Eric took me to Sainsbury’s. The sky was grey, and weighed down on the car. I felt so faint I nearly asked him to stop, but that would have alarmed me so I just leaned near the open window and tried to concentrate on the passing buildings … Everest Double Glazing … Little Chef … Elite Used Cars. When we arrived at Sainsbury’s it was busy and I felt the familiar fluttering. So I sat still for a moment and held the door handle.

  Then I spoke. I said: ‘Does it frighten you?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  I didn’t reply. I meant: does it frighten you, that it seems normal to talk to your wife? But then I realized, as he settled himself in the driver’s seat and lit his pipe, that he considered himself the sane one in a world that was mad.

  Later, when I unpacked my shopping, I found all sorts of packets that were new to me – frozen scampi, assorted Elastoplast. I couldn’t remember buying them. My face heated up and my mouth went dry. I thought: yes, I am mad. I’m mad and I’ll have to tell Ranjit. What will he do with me?

  And then, as I lifted out a jar of pickled onions, I realized I had simply got someone else’s shopping by mistake. Someone, somewhere, was looking at alien chicken quarters and feeling just the same way as me.

  For a moment I didn’t feel lonely. Standing there beside the fridge I laughed out loud, until the noise I made frightened me.

  Some nights later I was lying on my side looking at the street light glowing through the curtains. Beside me Ranjit slept. It was four o’clock; I felt damp and restless. My dreams had been disturbing and I was trying to calm myself by measuring the distance between the tulips on the curtains. Far away, a dog barked. I could hear my own heart thumping; these stupid panics were worse at night.

  Then I turned my head and froze. Ranjit was lying there with his eyes open.

  I don’t know why it gave me such a shock. Straight away he closed his eyes; this made it worse. After a moment I touched his shoulder, but he started breathing deeply, as if he were asleep. He couldn’t be – he knew that; I knew that.

  Suddenly I felt cold. I turned away and pretended to sleep. That dog went on barking; it sounded like somebody sawing through bones, on and on. I thought, for the first time: perhaps it’s not just me who’s mad.

  A place gets to you. Even in our ultra-modern estate it got to me. I had never really listened to Eric and he’d never listened to me, but what he said seeped through, or maybe it was that unsettling midsummer air. All those digital bleeps couldn’t reason away the uneasiness I felt in this foreign countryside. Because it was a strange place. Despite its motorways and its Happy Eaters it was pulling at me. Or perhaps the pulling came from inside.

  Whatever the reason, the next time I had to take a trip into Swindon – I was going to change my library books, though I hadn’t read them all – the next time I said to Eric, as we drove away past Elite Used Cars: ‘It’s too hot. Let’s go somewhere else.’

  To tell the truth I didn’t mind where we went. My hands stuck to the carrier-bag of books; my torpor made me bold. I just wanted some air. I remember exactly what I was wearing – my yellow C & A dress – and I remember Eric, who was never surprised, taking a right turn at the roundabout, with a car hooting behind him, and saying that if I’d never gone there before I ought to see the famous beauty spot. He started going on about local superstitions, and how ancient it all was and how you could see three counties from up there. But my eyes were closed and my mouth tasted last night’s dreams – they caught me off my guard each day; they rose in my throat.

  The drive took ages. I started to worry about the money and then I must have dozed off. Blurred, my horse was leaning over my garden fence and talking to me, its jaw working like a horse in a pantomime. It was blurred because I was jolting in the car, just like my dreams when I was jolted along in planes, and I started to feel queasy. And then I opened my eyes and we were driving up a narrow, bumpy lane and above me there was a hill, bleached in the sunlight. The sky was a block of blue above it. Somebody was talking but it was Eric, and he was asking me if I could see the horse carved out of the chalk but we were close up now, and all I could see, between the bushes, was a large dingy-white gap in the grass, too wide to recognize. He was saying they had once worshipped that horse, in pagan times. I felt sick; I wanted to go home. I didn’t know how long I had slept or whether it should strike me as odd to take a mini-cab on a joy-ride, except it didn’t feel joyful. I was too far from home; I would never find my way back. I wanted my kitchen, and my front door closed behind me. I wanted to be busy unpacking carrier-bags. My heart fluttered. I wanted it to be a safe weekday, or as safe as I could make it.

  I don’t know if I thought all this then, but I do know that I was already feeling tight and headachy, the panic swelling, long before I saw the glint of Ranjit’s car.

  In front of me was a chalky car park, with litter bins. I remember it exactly – that swift moment when I glanced around – even though all this happened a year ago. A few empty cars were parked there; not many, it was a Wednesday lunchtime. But there was another car parked in the far corner, apart from them, and for a moment I thought idly: a white Escort, just like his.

  Eric was asking me something but I didn’t hear. We bumped across the car park, closer now. I told myself it was only one head in there, not two. The sunlight flashed against the rear window; I told myself I must be mistaken. I wanted to go home.

  But Eric was driving nearer, and now I was telling myself: they’re just looking at the view. That’s why their heads are so close together. And then we were close up and I saw what they were doing. And then my head was down between my knees and I was saying to Eric take me home.

  The sunlight blinded me. As we bumped down the track I squeezed my eyes shut. Eric never knew anything was wrong.

  I might have understood, if it was a woman. In fact, in some way deep down I had expected it. But not a man. I hadn’t expected a man.

  When we got home I told Eric to wait outside. I hurried in.

  It’s surprising, once you look around a place for the last time, how little you want to take. I packed two suitcases and that was it. The whole process took about ten minutes. Oddly enough, my head was clear. It hurt, but it was clear. For the first time in years everything seemed quite simple. That panicky feeling had gone.

  I climbed into the cab and told Eric to drive to London. It was half past two. As we turned into the main road I told myself: I wasn’t mad at all. And I leant against the back seat.

  We got quite merry in the car, and stopped in Hungerford for a cream tea. Apparently people get like this – a bit hysterical – at funerals. God knows what Eric thought as I stuffed myself with fruit cake. I was suddenly hungry. I thought of the cupboards at home, full of food; they waited for my husband. I thought how little I had known him, and wondered if other wives ever felt the same. Not the circumstances – the feelings. No wonder I had found myself talking to horses.

  I’m living with my sister now. I never told her the real reason I left Ranjit. I just said I couldn’t stand it, living in the sticks.

  ‘Don’t blame you,’ she said. ‘All those cows for company.’

  ‘And a horse,’ I replied.

  ‘It would drive me round the bend,’ she went on.

  ‘It did.’

  • Monsters •

  DIANA

  Shall I describe her? You’ve probably seen her yourself in the magazines, though you wouldn’t know her
name. Sometimes her hair is long and silky and sometimes it’s been crinkled. Model girls are curiously anonymous, aren’t they, except that one you see with Mick Jagger … you know, what’s her name.

  Oh yes, and in the malt whisky advertisement, when she’s sitting by the fire, her hair is gently waved. In that photograph she looks quite married.

  Robert hasn’t married her yet; he has to wait until the winter, when the divorce comes through. What do middle-aged husbands do with their middle-aged wives? They trade them in for a younger model.

  See – I haven’t lost my sense of humour. Not entirely. Some people in fact – acquaintances, people I don’t know well – they even say I’m taking the whole thing remarkably well.

  Jessie’s not a top model, nothing like that. It’s only myself who notices the photos. She’s just quite successful and extremely pretty and as young as our daughters.

  I’m polishing the dining-room table at the moment. Even in my lowest moments I haven’t let the house go to seed. It’s quite large, you see; we’ve brought up the girls here. I’m using lavender polish; even in my misery I can breathe, with pleasure, the smell … scoop it up, creamy mauve, in my cloth.

  I wish I could say she was vacuous. She sometimes looks it – parted lips, spikey mascara. She isn’t. I’ve met her, you see. At a party, at Robert’s office, before any of this started. Well, I think it hadn’t started by then. He runs an industrial heating firm and she had featured in one of their advertisements. She was rather amusing – I remember her mimicking her Indian TV rental man. You see, I’m not being stupidly jealous, am I? I’m being fair.

  Do you want to know my secret, why I don’t let the house get the better of me? I invite someone to supper. I pull myself together then, I get out the Hoover. My visitors are always complimentary, how nice everything looks, what gorgeous flowers. I think they do it to avoid a scene. And from relief – that I’ve not let myself go. I haven’t, of course. Not while they’re in the house.

  The table’s all smeary now. I’m polishing it off. Robert and I bought this table – oh, years ago. We’d go round those funny little junk shops together, probably bored everybody with how little we’d paid – one realizes a lot of things later. At the time you’re closed in, aren’t you? A happy marriage makes one so short-sighted.

  Why didn’t I notice the signs, you might ask? They were obvious, I suppose – obvious to everyone else. He’s always been a handsome man. He’s put on a bit of weight, a bit fleshier, but it suits him. I should have realized something was up when he started growing his sideburns. And he started entertaining clients he said I’d find too boring to meet. He became more attentive to me … more distant but more attentive. It’s so humiliating. Such a cliché, isn’t it? That’s been one of the more painful surprises – that Robert, who’s always been so special, has acted in such a terribly predictable manner. Steph, my youngest daughter, she cried: ‘How can he be so corny!’

  I never let myself rip, like a fishwife. I never screamed at him. Even now, now he’s gone, I don’t exactly feel jealous about Jessie. Not in quite the way I expected. They call jealousy a green-eyed monster. Charming, the idea of something solid; you can grapple with a monster. But everyone knows it’s not like that … It’s like a gas. Sometimes I feel nauseous. I have to stop and hold on to a chair, or this table, until it passes.

  I’m polishing the table because Steph’s coming home. It’s her summer vacation, you see. They call it vacation, not holidays, at university. I’m getting the house straight. She’ll be here tomorrow.

  He didn’t take much with him. None of this furniture. Do you know, that was one of the things that hurt most? He was so decent about that side of things. Even though, for the past few years, way before Jessie came on the scene, I’d felt that he wasn’t becoming nicer, he was becoming … well, a bit sillier. A glassy-eyed, hectic look about him. Harder-hearted. According to Steph, it’s the male menopause. I don’t know whether it’s a relief, that there’s a word for it. I don’t want the word to apply to him. Menopause, adultery … Words you read in magazines.

  No, it wasn’t Jessie who changed him. She can’t give herself credit for that. She doesn’t realize … she hasn’t got the Robert I knew, and lived with, for thirty years.

  No, he left nearly everything here. It did hurt. As if he were saying: my new life, it offers me better things than material possessions.

  But these aren’t material possessions. We’ve had them too long for that. That’s why it’s rather painful. These marks on the table, I’m rubbing them with my cloth … The knife-marks the children made when they were bored, the scratches from a thousand family meals … Every grain, every knot so familiar to all of us … No! it’s not just a table, of course.

  Jessie

  ‘What about white?’ says Robert, and reads the label. ‘Anodized aluminium.’

  We’re looking at tables in Habitat. It’s Sunday afternoon and nearly closing time. We made love after lunch and both fell asleep afterwards.

  ‘A bit antiseptic,’ I say. ‘Like an operating table.’ I imagine it, shiny white in our bare white flat. We’ve paused, his arm tucked into mine. We feel flushed and unreal, displaced. We haven’t had time for a bath. People with push-chairs and loaded carrier-bags, struggling with family paraphernalia, edge past each other muttering apologies.

  ‘I haven’t bought any food,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll go out.’

  ‘I meant to get a joint for Sunday.’

  ‘Forget it.’ He squeezes my arm and smiles down at me, his face creasing. Then he turns to inspect the table. I love his profile. It’s heavy and sculptural, like an emperor’s on an old coin. It’s settled into its shape. The men I’ve known before seem just boys, shifting and unformed. He complains he’s getting fat, but when I put my arms around him it’s like putting them around an oak. He didn’t like it once, though, when I compared him to seasoned wood.

  ‘You mean rotten,’ he said. ‘Wormy.’

  I tried to explain the difference but he wouldn’t take it. He’s sensitive about his age. He’s always going on about it himself, but he doesn’t like anyone else to.

  ‘It’s very modern,’ I say, ‘Very high tech.’

  They’ve got some wooden ones over there, polished pine, but we’ve been through that. He doesn’t want that sort of furniture.

  ‘You like it, Jess?’

  I nod. I don’t mind. I don’t care. I want him to make the decision. I just want to get it home; for us to sit at it, day after day.

  We carry back the box. The table is in collapsed, kit form. I help him with it up the stairs. I’m terrified of him having a heart attack. He’s fifty-three, you see. He keeps himself fit. He goes to a businessman’s gym in Berkeley Square. He jogs. He is the most ardent lover. He runs his tongue over every inch of my body; he licks between my toes. Sometimes there seems a desperation in his breathing; he grips me as if I’m going to slip away. I tell him I won’t.

  He’s assembling the table now. Apparently, back in Kensington, he kept racks of tools in the garage. Here he has so little – just some crumpled paper bags with nails and nuts in them, and a hammer with the £6.40 sticker still on it. He struggles along with these limited means.

  I try to talk to him sometimes, about the past. About the house and the children. We can avoid talking about his wife if he likes. But I want to know the most ordinary, humdrum things. What they did at weekends; where the girls slept when they were little. I’ve seen the house but only from the street. A posh terraced place, with daffodils in the window-box. It didn’t give much away.

  He doesn’t want to talk about it. I mustn’t prod him too much. Oh, he’s told me a certain amount. I don’t think he deliberately keeps it from me. But he’s changed his life so dramatically. We live the other side of London from his house, his girls’ school, the garage that repaired his car – yesterday as he searched the yellow pages for the nearest Renault dealer, I felt such a pang for him. Most of his friends have taken
Diana’s side and I don’t blame them. We don’t see many people. We go to pubs around here – my area – and Greek restaurants and late-night shops where we buy silly expensive things to eat. We live erratically, on impulse. He enjoys that. He says it’s one of the things he loves in me. ‘You’re so fresh, Jess, you’ll never grow old. You live each minute as it comes.’ With the implied rebuke to his wife, that she didn’t. But with a large house, part-time work and two children I bet I’d be exactly the same. You’d have to plan, then. I tried to say that, once, but he just smiled, he didn’t really listen.

  He listens to my past. Especially he questions me about my old boyfriends; he’s terribly jealous. I tell him, truthfully, that he needn’t be. Other people have been important to me, people he’s not so interested in – my parents, my brothers. But my boyfriends weren’t, not in retrospect.

  He’s got three of the legs on now. The table is on its back, the legs sticking into the air. We’ll be sitting around it on Monday night because his daughter Stephanie’s coming to dinner.

  The walls are bare, except for a couple of studio shots of me that he’s pinned up. I find them embarrassing. I want us to get some real pictures. We will, he says, we’ll go shopping. Those photos of me, they make this place look like a studio, not a home … I want to see photos of his family. His wife has the albums. He has a few snapshots but I want enough to linger over. After all, he’s got me. Why stick me on the walls too?